First Hospital on the High Plains of Texas_St. Anthony's Hospital_Founded 1901
Amarillo, Potter County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This marks site of Potter County's first hospital organized by Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word on invitation of Father David H. Dunne, Pastor of St. Mary's Church in Clarendon, Texas, and David Fly, M.D., Amarillo. Land was donated by Wm. H. Bush. Four Sisters opened hospital as St. Anthony's Sanitarium. Original building (demolished in 1955 to make room for present School of Nursing) was a 14 room red-brick structure without gas, electricity or telephone service. A 2-story addition in 1909 provided thirty beds and an operating room. Despite hard times, a School of Nursing was also opened that year. In 1922, a third story was added to 1909 building, presently used by the Sisters as a convent. In 1927-28, another addition enlarged facilities to 100-bed capacity and provided a laboratory, delivery rooms, X-ray rooms, and more surgical suites. A third addition in 1949 brought total capacity to 150 beds. A $2,000,000 addition in 1960 making St. Anthony's a 250-bed general hospital was made possible by funds raised by the Amarillo Area Foundation. (1966)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1901 four Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word answered a priest's and a doctor's invitation to open the first hospital on the Texas High Plains, on land a local benefactor donated in Amarillo. Their original 14-room brick building had neither gas, electricity, nor a telephone, yet within a decade they had added beds, an operating room, and a school of nursing. Through the twentieth century the institution grew addition by addition into a major regional hospital.
Why it matters
The hospital shows how Catholic sisters brought modern medicine and nursing education to the raw frontier, building enduring institutions where none had existed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, Amarillo was a young town on the Texas Panhandle — the flat, wind-scoured tableland known as the High Plains. The railroad had arrived only a couple of decades earlier, and the region was still defined by cattle, distance, and hard weather. This was frontier country in the fullest sense: settlements were small, help was far away, and the modern conveniences taking hold in eastern cities had not yet reached the plains.
The year 1901 sits squarely in what historians call the Progressive Era, a time when Americans were building the institutions of modern life — schools, public health services, and hospitals — often for the first time in places that had gone without them. On the High Plains, a serious illness or accident could be a death sentence simply because there was nowhere to go and no one trained to help.
Into that gap stepped a religious order with a long tradition of nursing the sick. The founding of a hospital here was not just a medical event; it was a marker of a raw region beginning to knit itself into settled, organized civic life.
People & events
The story begins with an invitation. Father David H. Dunne, a parish priest, and David Fly, a local physician, together called on the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word — an order devoted to caring for the sick — to bring a hospital to the young community. A local benefactor, William H. Bush, donated the land on which it would stand.
Four Sisters answered that call and opened the doors of what they named St. Anthony's Sanitarium. Their first building was a fourteen-room red-brick structure with none of the comforts we now take for granted in a hospital — no gas, no electricity, no telephone. That they nursed patients under such conditions says a great deal about the determination behind the enterprise.
What followed was decades of steady, hard-won growth. A two-story addition in 1909 brought thirty beds and an operating room, and in the same year — described on the marker as a time of hardship — the Sisters opened a school of nursing. Later additions raised a third story that became the Sisters' convent, expanded the hospital toward a hundred beds with laboratories, delivery rooms, X-ray rooms, and surgical suites, and eventually pushed capacity well past a hundred and fifty. A major mid-century expansion, funded through community fundraising, turned the institution into a large general hospital. The original 1901 building was taken down in 1955 to make room for the growing School of Nursing.
Its place in the American story
The founding of St. Anthony's is a small, vivid chapter in a much larger American story: the role that Catholic sisters played in building the nation's health care. Across the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orders of women religious founded and ran hospitals — often the first in their towns or regions — long before public health systems existed. On frontiers where private capital and government were both scarce, these women were among the most effective institution-builders America had.
The pattern here is instructive. A hospital rose not from a corporation or a city budget but from a partnership: a priest and a doctor who saw the need, a landowner who gave the ground, and a community of trained women who did the work and stayed for generations. That combination of faith, medicine, and local generosity built a surprising share of American health care.
Just as important is the school of nursing opened in the lean early years. Training nurses locally meant the region could sustain its own care rather than depend on distant cities — a quiet but foundational step in bringing modern medicine to the American West.
If you visit
You're in Amarillo, in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, where the sky is enormous and the land runs flat to the horizon. Standing at the marker, it takes some imagination to picture the four Sisters opening a fourteen-room brick hospital with no electric light and no telephone — but that is exactly what began on this ground.
Look for the layers of time here. The very first building is gone, taken down in the 1950s to expand the School of Nursing, so what you see reflects the institution's later, larger life rather than its humble start. The marker itself is the thread back to 1901, and reading it on-site turns an ordinary block into the birthplace of medicine on the High Plains.
It makes a natural stop on a Panhandle history trip. Amarillo is a crossroads town with plenty of frontier and Route-era heritage nearby, and this site adds a human, institution-building dimension — the story of the people who made sure that a growing town could care for its sick.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Father David H. Dunne
- · David Fly
- · William H. Bush
Themes & tags
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